Family Historian User Group

Is it possible to create a chart which shows living people with a box marked "private"? I want to put charts on my website with out infringing on people's privacy.
Thanks

Yes, that is possible by creating a custom Diagram Text Scheme.
However, the details depend on what criteria you intend to use to determine living people.
e.g. Record flag: Living?

Bear in mind that deceased close relatives in the Diagram will probably give away each Private person's identity.
e.g. Deceased parent, sibling & spouse Names and BMD details that can easily be used to reveal the Private persons.

Thanks Mike. That's an interesting point - I intend to use the "living" flag as you say the private person can be worked out but I'll have given a level of privacy yet retain the information for the genealogist - it's a very very samll family in anycase.

The approach I use for Ancestry sync is to mark close relatives as “Private” using the built-in Private flag. They are then excluded automatically.

Use the Diagram > Options > Text tab and Clone a Text Scheme that is similar to what you need.
Use the Edit Text Scheme... features to Edit each Item and make it conditional on the Living or Private record flag not being set using the tick options lower right.
Add another custom Item that displays PRIVATE conditionally on the Living or Private record flag being set.

Excellent - that's what I'll do.

Thanks to all.

Another approach would be to use the 'Clean Living Persons' Plugin on a COPY of your project, which 'privatises' the underlying data everywhere, not just in the diagrams (in case you also want to use reports on your website.)

tatewise wrote: ↑

05 Feb 2022 11:32

Bear in mind that deceased close relatives in the Diagram will probably give away each Private person's identity.
e.g. Deceased parent, sibling & spouse Names and BMD details that can easily be used to reveal the Private persons.

Rather than trying to identify living persons, you could have a generational cut-off. You identity the cut-off line such that there is a two generation gap between those who you would expect to be probably alive (until COVID that would have been my parents' and uncles' and aunts' generation) and the "most recent" person published in your tree (so I do not - at least by tree - publish details of grandparents and great uncles/aunts - but I am relatively sanguine about publishing details of my long dead great-grandparent's generation).

That will avoid accidentally publishing details of someone still alive (but very old) and will also minimise publishing details of the parents of someone who is still alive. The dead have no legal right to privacy, but their immediate offspring may feel a moral right for certain details of their parents to be kept private. Our curatorial drive is probably not an adequate excuse for over-riding such sentiments?

The "bottom line" of such a tree however probably contains enough detail for cousins to "recognise" a family relationship.

By applying a generational cut-off you also produce tidier trees - which matters when printing. However be aware that a single generational cut-off across a wide tree may not be sufficient because the individual on the extreme left could be 20 or more years older than the individual on the extreme right - despite being in the same "generational line".

I'd reinforce sentiments expressed above about a simplistic dead / living approach perhaps being inadequate.

Of course, if you have a small audience where everyone knows pretty much everyone else, then your objective is probably more like a gentle obscuring of matters, so as not to be too blatant about displaying what everyone knows anyway. Just good manners.

Ancestry do a good job of making boxes of living people private. However, in the majority of cases, when I'm looking at a tree of my contacts, as Mike says, I can generally work out who's who, especially if they are a DNA match and I know their Ancestry user name. And if there are deceased people within the current generation (to take David's point), I can actually feel a little embarrassed - e.g. the husband of one of my contacts had died while still young. She'd updated all his details, including his death date, so I was looking at all those details which, by implication, told me a lot about her.